//------------------------------//
// Chapter 64: Crash Landed 
// Story: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse: The Equestrian Adventure 
// by wingdingaling 
//------------------------------//







	Chapter 64: Crash Landed


The jungle quietly collected itself after the sudden clamor.
Just within the treeline that grew from the abyss, the branches grew tightly packed and clustered together, and their leaves grew wide and sturdy. It was atop these arboreal platforms that scraps of broken bridge lay strewn. The passengers previously on it were nowhere to be seen.
Somewhere within the darkened mass of the giant trees, a mouse opened her eyes.
For a moment, she had forgotten where she was, or how she had even got there. After a moment of thinking she began to piece together all of the different circumstances.
She had been walking on a bridge to cross a deep chasm. When suddenly partway across, the bridge broke.
“Did I fall all the way to the bottom?” Minnie dazedly wondered to herself, when she couldn’t see the sky above.
No. Of course not. If she had fallen all the way to the bottom of that abyss, she knew that she could not have possibly survived.
“What happened just now?” the mouse thought.
She was walking across the bridge. Her friends had gotten into trouble--
Minnie’s senses snapped back to her in an instant. Her friends had been with her, and now they were nowhere in sight.
“Spike!? Pluto!?” she called out.
She did not wait for an answer as she painfully got to her feet. There were no serious injuries to herself. Nothing was bleeding, nothing was broken. All that there was was the feeling of having been dropped on one side from a great height. A feeling that made her lurch as soon as she put weight on one side of her, but quickly got over and was able to hobble around to look for her friends. Except that there was barely any room to hobble to.
For some reason that she could not understand, there was a wall of something tall and white in front of herself, which prevented her from running anywhere. Pressing her hands on the smooth, strangely silken wall, Minnie found that it went on and on as she followed it to one side. And soon, she felt as if she had gone in a full circle around wherever she had ended up.
“Help! Somebody get me out of here!” Minnie called.
Far off, a dark ear twitched. And the shadowy being attached to it followed the direction of the noise. Guided by the noise and the ghostly glow of her eyes, she lurked deeper into the jungle.
Minnie was banging her palms against the strange walls, trying in vain to fight her way out.

“Ribbit!”

The familiar sound of a croaking frog drew Minnie’s attention behind herself. There, sitting on what looked like a sort of tapered, yellow cylinder was a very large, very green frog. The frog simply sat, doing nothing but stare Minnie down with its bulging, red eyes.
“Ribbit!” it said again.
“Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Do you live here?” Minnie asked.
The frog twitched an eye down, then back up to Minnie.
The mouse looked down, and saw that she was standing in a very shallow pool of water. A fact that she had not at all been aware of previously. In the pool, dozens of tadpoles the size of half-dollars swam curiously around her ankles. One of them even tried to touch the tip of Minnie’s shoe with its mouth, but backed away when it tasted nothing like food.
“I’m not intruding on feeding time? Am I?” Minnie asked.
“Ribbit!”
“Then, could you show me some way out of here?”
The frog said nothing, but stared blankly at Minnie. Then, very jerkily and mechanically, as if it were too big to support its own weight, the frog started to turn around. It hopped and turned a little. Then, it hopped and turned a little more. Finally, after the sixth or seventh time of this routine, the frog jumped high straight upward.
Minnie watched, thinking that not even a frog that big could jump high enough to escape the high walls that surrounded them.
The frog came back down on the platform it had been resting on. And the platform compressed beneath the frog, then sprang back upward with incredible force.
The frog was shot higher up than it had jumped. And with that, it was able to land atop the next highest tapered cylinder.
“Goodness!” Minnie gasped at the sight.
Around her ankles, the tadpoles applauded the display by clapping one another’s tail fins together.
That was it. However she had ended up wherever she was, Minnie had found her way out.
Ever mindful of the little tadpoles around her feet, Minnie waded her way through the water toward the tapered cylinder and climbed on top of it. Once on top, she stood up and gently applied her weight downward. The cylinder gently jostled down and up, and Minnie could feel the latent energy that was just waiting to burst forth.
Jumping up, Minnie pressed as much of her weight down as she could, and the cylinder compressed under her weight, then sprang sharply up.
Minnie felt herself rocketing through the air, and landed safely on the next highest cylinder with the frog.
“Oh--! That was--That was like flying!” Minnie said.
“Ribbit!” the frog answered, before it jumped off and splashed back into the water below.
“Thanks for the help!” Minnie called after, before she jumped on the cylinder and shot up to the next one.
The next landing was slightly more unsteady, as Minnie found the platform she landed upon to bend at the middle under her weight.
Arching her back and windmilling her arms, the mouse was able to keep atop her foothold, as it sank beneath her weight. Before she slipped off of the edge, she was able to go springing upward, when she landed on the next highest cylinder.
This one bent so much under her weight that Minnie had to stand on the opposite edge from the direction of the bend. When it bent so far over that Minnie was nearly standing on the other side, something like a green vine was lowered down to her.
“Kee-kee!”
Looking up, Minnie saw that it was not a vine, but the tail of the mother monkey who had fallen with them on the bridge.
The monkey nudged her tail closer to Minnie, who reached out and took hold of it.
Once the mouse had securely gripped, the mother monkey started reeling her tail up like a fishing line.
As she went up, Minnie looked down and saw that she was being lifted out of the inside of a gigantic flower. One that had grown to be far larger than anything that was natural. After a few more moments of going upward, Minnie was level with the branch that the mother monkey sat upon, and gently swung her way to a safe landing.
“Kee-ko-kee,” the mother said, after pulling her tail from the branch.
“Um...Yes. Thank you,” Minnie answered, not at all sure of what was said to her, if anything at all.
A brief look around herself, and Minnie thought that she could not have landed so far into the treeline. All around her, evidence of the crash was seen from the broken planks and frayed ropes.
From behind the mother monkey, a tiny, green head peered out. After a moment of curious staring, the baby monkey scampered from its hiding place to examine Minnie more closely.
“Well, hello there,” Minnie said, reaching out a hand to pat the baby on its head.
Before her hand ever reached its mark, the green baby darted back to the safety of its mother's presence.
Minnie was taken slightly aback by the baby’s sudden retreat. But for the moment, she could not worry about that. Somewhere, her friends were lost in the jungle and it was up to her to find them.
“Thanks again for your help. But, I have to find my friends,” Minnie said.
She walked along the branches, and found that the tightly packed clusters of leaves and twigs supported her weight perfectly. Before she was able to take two steps, she heard the following steps of the mother monkey.
“Kee-kee,” the mother said.
“Yes?” Minnie asked.
The mother monkey said and did nothing.
Minnie was about to walk away again when the mother took a step closer.
“Koo-kee-ko-ko.”
For whatever reason, Minnie was starting to believe that the mother monkey was trying to stop her. And the more that she looked at the mother’s face, the more that she recognized the look of fear and desperation.
“What’s wrong?” Minnie asked.
The mother monkey looked down to her baby, who was still staring warily at Minnie.
It was then that the mouse realized exactly what was happening.
“Oh! Your babies!”
Somehow during the crash, the mother had been separated from all but one of her children. And Minnie knew that she was experiencing the absolute worst fear of any parent. For herself, it was almost the same as losing Spike and Pluto. Deciding that she could more easily find her own lost friends with somebody else helping her, Minnie made up her mind.
“Alright. I’ll help you look for your children. If you help me look for my own friends,” Minnie said.
“Kee-kee,” the mother monkey said, before she hitched her baby’s tail around her own and started walking across the branches, and brushing a broken piece of bridge out of the way.



Somewhere else in the jungle, the crash from before was still letting itself be known. All of the scraps of the broken bridge laid strewn about among the broken twigs and fallen leaves that mounted up on the packed branches.
Against one of the tree trunks, a pile of fallen leaves started to shake. Then, it huffed and a golden orange snout poked through. Shortly after the snout, the rest of Pluto followed it, and rose to his paws from the leaves.
The hound dog shook his whole body, removing any debris that had clung to his fur. Then, he snorted and chuffed, blowing out anything that would block his nose and inhibit his sense of smell. And what smells he encountered.
The whole place smelled like a freshly mowed lawn, with many hints of too many other scents for Pluto to immediately identify. Some were close by, while others were very faint, coming from somewhere deep within the darkness where the giant trees grew. Among the smells, he tried to pick out any that were familiar.
Pluto sniffed the air, and walked across the tightly packed branches, finding them to be as solid as any ground he had walked on before.
After only a few steps, he started to get traces of a scent that he recognized. Faint hints of perfume, mixed with garden soil and pastry dough, along with a slight waft of peroxide and clean linens. Turning his head around and around until it twisted, Pluto tried finding the direction that the scent was the strongest. When he found it, he jumped up and his whole body untwisted itself, allowing him to follow the smell.
Keeping his nose to the air, the hound dog followed the smell across the leafy platform, right up to the edge, and jumped across the small gap that led to the next. The next platform was just as solid as the first, letting him perfectly land without losing a beat.
The next platform was equally disheveled by the crash he and the others had experienced, littered with broken planks, frayed ropes and whole sections of the bridge that had come apart.
Pluto was so engrossed in his search that he did not notice that he was now walking along a broken piece of rope that was suspended between two other leafy platforms. Without even realizing it, he walked across the rope with the ease and balance of a circus tightrope performer.
As he walked across, a line of tropical birds were watching his performance. As they watched, they scuttled along the branch that they were roosted on, perfectly mimicking his progress along the rope. Until the first bird in line bumped against the tree trunk, and all the subsequent birds after bumped into one another.
A loud cacophony of angry squawking reached Pluto’s ears when he reached the other side of the rope, but he did not pay it any mind.
Keeping his nose to its task, the hound dog followed the scent toward the tree trunk, and did not even notice that he was climbing up a broken part of the bridge like a ladder as he went on.
At the top, Pluto was on another large branch and walked along its length to another cluster of tightly packed twigs and leaves. Only, they were not quite as solid as the ones he had previously encountered.
The first step onto the platform and Pluto’s paw went right through it, sinking him up to his shoulder.
Yanking his paw out, Pluto snapped out of his hunt for the scent and saw what had almost happened.
Looking at where he had just stepped, the hound dog saw that the leaves where he was going were not as tightly packed as the ones he had previously been walking upon. These leaves were much looser, and stuck out in all directions, as opposed to the almost uniformly flat leaf beds he was walking on earlier.
Carefully shuffling along the branch, Pluto found another part of the same platform of leaves that looked the way it had before, when walking through trees was safe. He cautiously placed one paw on the leaves and pressed it down.
It stayed firm.
Pluto gradually applied more of his weight to his paw, and found that it was still as solid as he had known it to be. With that, he resumed following the scent of his friends, while carefully watching for any more precarious pitfalls.
Just beneath his nose, a cluster of leaves started to twitch. Pluto twitched at the unexpected movement, and carefully observed the anomaly. Curious to the nature of it, he started to paw some of the leaves away from the top.
He had just taken enough away to allow what was underneath to reveal itself. One of the baby monkeys poked its little blue head above the leafy cover and looked around until it saw Pluto.
So, it was the punk kid again, was it. Pluto had half a mind to chase it back into the hole that it had just crawled out of. But, a sudden thought occurred to him.
For a moment, Pluto thought that he may have been following a red herring and sniffed the little monkey’s head to be sure.
When he did, the monkey sniffed him right back and leaned in close to take in the hound dog’s full scent.
Pluto recoiled from being sniffed so earnestly, but what he had found was that the little monkey was not at all carrying the scent that he was following.
With his nose to the air, Pluto resumed his search. After only a few steps, he stopped when he felt a sudden weight snag his tail.
Looking over his shoulder, Pluto saw that the little monkey was now hanging from his tail by its own long, prehensile tail. 
Of all the outrageous presumptions. There was Pluto trying to find his missing friends after they had all plummeted into the forest, and the little punk who provoked him was trying to bum a ride.
 Pluto bared his teeth and growled at his tiny passenger, ready to chase him off of his own tail.
The little monkey did nothing but stare back, silently pleading to be allowed to ride.
One look, and Pluto slowly stopped baring his teeth. Moments after, his growling waned. There, riding on his tail was a creature far too young to survive on its own. Far from its mother and its siblings, it stood no chance in the wilderness of the jungle.
And so, without any of the nagging from his conscience, Pluto decided that as the only adult around it was his responsibility to deliver the little monkey to his mother.
The little monkey cheered and clapped his hands and feet together.
Huffing indignantly and rolling his eyes, the hound dog set back to work sniffing the air for the direction of Minnie’s scent.